


O Creator!

by thestarkinwinterfell



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-29
Updated: 2012-07-29
Packaged: 2017-11-10 23:11:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/471767
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thestarkinwinterfell/pseuds/thestarkinwinterfell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Derek seems to have simply disappeared. Isaac attempts to take control of the pack but finds that being an Alpha isn't all it's cracked up to be. A fic about a pack in transition.</p>
            </blockquote>





	O Creator!

**Author's Note:**

> This is kind of just a study of an idea that's bigger than this tiny fic is; aka an exploration of what might be like for him if Isaac ever had to be the Alpha.
> 
> All quotes are from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

_“Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.”_ __

 

 

 

There’s a handprint on one of the windows at the warehouse. It has been there for weeks, since before Derek disappeared and Boyd punched a hole in the wall and Erica nearly ripped his throat out trying to stop him from doing it again. Isaac stands in front of the window and looks at it every morning and wonders if the day that he puts his hand up to it is the day that everything will be fixed.

 

He’s too afraid, though. So he counts the fingers every morning and looks away.

 

It’s too big to be his, he knows, and too small to be Boyd’s, which is why it was probably made by Derek, who stumbled one morning and laid his palm on the window for support, or who stood there looking out at the night after the sun set an pressed one hot palm against the cool glass. It was made by Derek, their Alpha, their maker.

 

Creations bereft of their maker are undeniably dangerous things.

 

Isaac doesn’t feel like an Alpha now, maybe because Derek’s still alive somewhere and Isaac is nothing more than a beta trying to fill someone else’s larger shoes. He looks at the handprint and thinks of the subway car, where he put his hands on Boyd’s chest and looked Derek in the eye and knew that he was doing the right thing. But maybe Derek _is_ dead, and maybe Isaac is the Alpha, and maybe there is nothing special to feel except to feel like crying because you are so very afraid.

 

‘Isaac.’

 

Boyd’s standing behind him, looking at his face and probably right through the handprint, which in the grand scheme of things Isaac must remind himself doesn’t actually matter.

 

‘Yeah,’ Isaac says. ‘What?’

 

Boyd looks at his feet, and then up again. His eyes don’t open all the way, and neither does his mouth, like he would do anything to avoid saying what he’s about to say next. ‘You seen Erica?’ he asks instead.

 

‘No,’ Isaac says. There is something disgusting and heavy in his stomach and it’s weighing him down like rocks.

 

Boyd doesn’t say anything. He just nods, and lets them both think all the same things without having to articulate them aloud.

 

‘I’ll go look for her,’ Isaac says after a moment, and Boyd nods again. Isaac waits until he’s gone, until he is sure that there is no one looking, and turns to press his hand up against the glass.

 

The print is too big. He already knew it, but suddenly it feels more real. He is too small. For all of it.

 

 _Take it back,_ he wants to scream. _Take it back._

 

But he smears his palm back and forth against the glass instead until there’s nothing but a foggy smear.

 

 

 

_“Satan has his companions, fellow-devils, to admire and encourage him; but I am solitary and detested.”_ __

 

 

 

It doesn’t take him long to find her. It’s dark out already, and the night is cool and crisp for spring, but Erica is standing outside a liquor store in the town center, throwing glass bottles one after another into the street. They shatter, and glass and the acrid smell of the alcohol flies everywhere. Her mouth is an angry red smear, an Isaac thinks that she looks beautiful.

 

‘Erica,’ he says. ‘Come home.’ The words sound ridiculous as soon as he says them, because he means for her to come back to the warehouse, for her to come back to him and to Boyd. He wants to tell her that they would build her a home if she wanted one, that they would crouch over her to make a roof or stretch her a tent out of their skin.

 

That’s not a home, though, and he knows it. She looks at him with big, round eyes and drops the last bottle onto the concrete.

 

‘What are you doing?’ he asks her.

 

‘Anything,’ she says. Then, ‘I’m trying to think.’

 

‘You’ll come back to us, though?’ he asks. He sounds timid and afraid, his words full of empty bravado. The wind nearly carries them away.

 

She shakes her head. ‘I don’t know.’

 

‘You have to,’ he says. It’s what he meant to say but not how he meant to say it. _You have to, Erica,_ because I said so and I’m your Alpha and I’m in charge. Not _You have to, Erica,_ because if you don’t I’m not sure how to get up in the mornings anymore. ‘Boyd and I—It’s not enough.’

 

He reaches for her arm.

 

‘It is,’ she says.

 

He feels her tiny wrist beneath his palm, thin bones and the tight strain of her skin. Her pulse.

 

‘It has to be,’ she says.

 

And he smiles and pulls her back toward him and says, ‘ _It’s not.’_ Her face changes.

 

‘Then you’re no better an Alpha than Derek was.’ She spits at him, and it lands at his feet. Erica stares down at it for a moment, as though she’s looking for something in it that isn’t there. ‘A pack is whatever you’ve got. You don’t get to wish that it was different, or bigger. There are people who are there and people who aren’t and it works because it has to. Boyd’s your pack now, Isaac, because he wants to be. And I’m not, because I _don’t._ ’

 

She turns from him and walks away, so that Isaac has no other choice but to stand there, surrounded by bits of broken glass, and watch her go. She doesn’t look back at him, but she stumbles, once, because she’s drunk or because she’s walking too close to the curb or because there’s a rock stuck to the bottom of her high heeled shoe. Isaac reaches after her, as though if he cups his hand beneath her silhouette in the distance it will be enough for her to fall into.

 

But she just keeps walking, and eventually she’s gone.

 

 

 

_“He is dead who called me into being, and when I shall be no more the very remembrance of us both will speedily vanish.”_ __

 

 

 

He and Boyd take turns throwing the other against the ground so hard the floor shakes. When Isaac gets a splinter, he picks it out of his skin with his own hands and watches the wound clear up. He’s still looking at it when Boyd’s fists connect with his chest again. The air comes out of him like nothing he’s ever felt before.

 

And suddenly he’s on his back, staring at the ceiling, wondering what in fuck’s sake he is supposed to do. He can’t get up.

 

He can’t get up.

 

And he knows that if he were Derek and if he really couldn’t get up and if Boyd weren’t Boyd then he would call Scott.

 

Scott, who hasn’t come to see him since Derek disappeared. Scott who was pack but who always seemed to think that pack was a one way street. It’s not though, Isaac realizes. Pack is whatever you’ve got. And it’s got to be enough.

 

Isaac throws Boyd off of him with such force that he slams into one of the ceiling supports and dust rains down on both their heads.

 

‘I’m going out,’ he says, with such certainty in his voice that Boyd doesn’t even question him. Instead he mumbles something about chili cheese fries that makes Isaac grin so that he doesn’t even realize that he’s grinning. A reminder that they’re people, that there’s substance in them more than sorrow, that while he’s on his way to try and save their shit, Boyd is still living.

 

It’s enough. It’s got to be enough.

 

 

 

_“He seems to feel his own worth, and the greatness of his fall.”_ __

 

 

 

The positive outweighs the negative. Stiles opens the window, only to lean out and say ‘No. Absolutely not.’

 

But the window is open, and Isaac is stronger, and in just a few moments the window is closed again and Isaac is sitting gingerly down on Stiles’s bed. The spring creaks. Stiles perches on the chair at his desk, spreading his arms back and over what looks like a yearbook and a pile of papers covered in an illegible scrawl.

 

The entire room smells like guilt. It’s all too familiar and it makes Isaac wrinkle his knows. His sheets reek of it when he wakes up every morning. Stiles sits stiff-backed and doesn’t move. Isaac wonders whether, if he wrapped his hand around Stiles’s throat, Scott could hear his friend’s accelerated heartbeat from however far away. His hand twitches, but he doesn’t move.

 

‘I want to know why no one’s turned you,’ he says.  
  
Stiles’s mouth opens and then shuts. ‘You’re not going to try,’ he says quickly. ‘I taste—bad.’

 

Isaac can’t help it; he flinches. Because he doesn’t want to eat Stiles. Because he doesn’t want to eat anybody, and though he knows that it is just a joke it hits him like a punch to the gut. He thinks of Erica, smashing bottles on the sidewalk, who would eat another person up if they suggested she might like it, just to prove that she was as bad as they expected her to be

 

‘I just want to know. It seems like you—‘ He falters. Now that he’s here, he’s not sure what to say. The idea seemed so solid not an hour ago, outside in the night. It seemed to him then that Stiles, who he did not particularly even want to turn was the key to Scott, that Stiles in his pack would bring Scott into it, too.

 

Now, he was less sure. Lycanthropy had changed him, and it might change Stiles, too. It might change his relationship with Scott. It might sever bonds instead of make them. Desperation masks the smell of guilt, this time from Isaac himself. Shame makes him bow his head. He should leave. Somewhere, Boyd is eating chili cheese fries. Somewhere, Boyd doesn’t feel like he needs to try so hard.

 

‘It seems like I,’ Stiles says, ‘would be interested in what werewolf-ism has to offer.’

 

‘Forget it.’ Isaac stands. He’s lost the upper hand to Stiles—to just Stiles—and it’s mortifying.

 

‘I’m not interested,’ Stiles says. Isaac struggles with the latch on the window as Stiles comes up behind him. ‘I know that it fixed a lot of things for you, what Derek did for you and that’s great but it’s not me. The things that I’m afraid of don’t get fixed like that. I can’t prove myself to me if I make that choice.’

 

Isaac can feel Stiles’s heart beating, heavy and fast, not because he’s lying or because he is afraid but because he didn’t mean to say any of that, for Isaac to hear it, and that makes it somehow comforting because that means that it’s _true_. Stiles reaches around and undoes the latch beneath Isaac’s clumsy fingers and Isaac goes, running until he feels like he’s _gone_ , until he can’t hear Stiles’s heartbeat, until all that’s left for him to do is wonder whether anybody is ever worth in their own eyes.

 

 

 

_“...we are unfashioned creatures, but half made up, if one wiser, better, dearer than ourselves - such a friend ought to be - do not lend his aid to perfectionate our weak and faulty natures.”_ __

 

 

 

Scott calls him the next afternoon. His voice is full of static but no less combative, and it makes the hair of the back of Isaac’s neck stand up straight. He and Boyd had considered where to start looking for Derek this morning, but all of their theories sounded broken and hollow when spoken aloud.

 

‘Do you want us never to find him?’ Boyd had shouted at him. ‘Is that it? Because if you shake your head _no_ to every possibility then it’s never going to happen.’

 

‘Fuck _you,_ ’ Isaac had said, ripping up Boyd’s biceps with drawn claws. But what he’d really meant to say was _No. I want to find him. And I want him to be proud of me—of us—when we do._

 

They haven’t spoken since midmorning. Scott’s voice is abrasive and hurts Isaac ears.

 

‘If you ever even think about touching Stiles—‘ Isaac tunes the rest of it out.

 

‘I was never going to,’ he lies, over and over again until Scott stops talking.

 

‘I know that you’re upset,’ Scott says awkwardly, finally. He says a bunch of other things that only make it clear how badly he wants to stop talking.

 

Isaac hangs up on him. ‘Derek would have wanted it to be you instead of me,’ he says.

 

Boyd brings him lunch when it’s just about dinner time and the two of them eat in silence.

 

 

 

_“One as deformed and horrible as myself, could not deny herself to me. My companion must be of the same species, and have the same defects... with whom I can live in the interchange of those sympathies necessary for my being...”_ __

 

 

 

Erica is screaming in the night. It sounds so close that Isaac thinks that she’s on top of him at first, strangling him or fucking him or _something_ , and he wakes up a cold sweat.

 

It’s a nightmare, he thinks, until the screaming doesn’t stop, until the night is alive with it, until the sound is crawling down his throat and oozing out through his skin. He can hear Boyd’s heart racing and he doesn’t know where that is either. It’s too much, far too much, to be tied to these people and to feel this pain.

 

The pack is supposed to make them stronger, but sometimes Isaac thinks that it would be easier to just run, to go and go until he escaped all their expectations, until approval was no longer a goal because it no longer existed, to just be what you are, alone, and nothing more. He wonders briefly about what Derek said, about an Alpha becoming a Beta, or even an Omega. He’s being pulled toward Erica, and Boyd, too. He can feel the ways they’re all connected, the spirals on a triskelion. Isaac, Erica, Boyd.

 

He wonders how an Omega ever becomes an Alpha. How somebody who has been alone makes the decision not to be so anymore. But he’s been alone. He does know. And that’s why he runs toward Erica instead of away.

 

 

 

_“Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.”_ __

 

 

 

She’s in pieces; literally. Her body is terrible to look at and broken apart. For the first few moments Isaac and Boyd stand there, alone in a cold cluster of trees, looking down at her in silence. Isaac doesn’t know what to do. He thinks that she must be dead, that she _surely_ must be dead, but that’s a human thing to think.

 

She twitches, first her fingers and then her arms where her skin is stitching itself back together. Her lungs make a disgusting rasping noise until they, too, are carefully repaired. She’s lying there, on a bed of bloody leaves, staring up right through their faces at the starry sky.

 

‘Argents,’ she says. Her voice is a whisper, and Isaac’s not sure he understands until she goes on. ‘They took him. They must have took—him.’

 

‘What did you do?’ Isaac asks. He drops to his knees. What he wants to ask is _Why didn’t they kill you_? Did she go, on her own, to try and do what Isaac could not? To her, was everything so easy and possible that she would risk her life on hunch, while for Isaac

 

‘I didn’t kill—anyone,’ she says, and though it acts as a reassurance, her voice marks it as nothing more than a regret. Isaac, too, knows that he should want them dead, that there should be something more akin to anger than simple relief coursing through his veins.

 

Maybe that’s what it means to be an Alpha, that revenge matters less than the safety of your pack. He takes Erica’s hand.

 

‘Is it enough?’ she says. Her voice is so soft that he barely hears it.

 

He doesn’t have to look over his shoulder to know that Boyd is standing there, watching them.

 

‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘It is.’ And when he offers to carry her home she punches him in the stomach.

 

 

 

_“Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it.”_ __

 

 

 

They’re stronger together. They’re stronger together.

 

When they’re together it means that Isaac doesn’t have to do everything on his own. That was how Derek did things, with secrets and solidarity that only mattered when he asked for it to, but now, when Isaac sits down with Erica and Boyd and they talk, Isaac stays quiet often to let them speak and he realizes that if he is an Alpha now, he is because they want him to be, because he’s willing to try, because there can be no Alpha without a Beta. The pack makes him who he is.

 

They decide to stop looking for Derek, not because they think he can’t be found, but because they can’t begin to hope that he’ll come back until they’ve accepted that he might be gone. There’s a Kanima, out there, and the Argents, too, and they are certain that Scott knows something that they don’t about how to make this all right. There are fences that they need to go about mending, trust that they need to rebuild, shadows that they need to step out of and handprints that it’s time to wipe away.

 

Acceptance doesn’t make the hurt any less, and hardly makes the future any easier. They’re a pack in transition.

 

And that’s enough.


End file.
